If there’s one feature that Twitter users have been requesting the company for years, that’s the edit button. While Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has already made it clear that the company will not add an edit button in the foreseeable future, a bug on Twitter gave users hope for a brief moment.
As spotted by Twitter user Star Simpson and reported by The Verge, Twitter’s compose feature behaved in a way that led Twitter users to believe that the company is working on implementing an edit-like feature. The incident happens just a month after an ‘Undo Send’ button was spotted in Twitter survey as part of its subscription model.
Here’s how the bug functioned: When a Twitter user replied to a tweet and deleted it immediately, the tweet composer automatically brought back the full text from the previously deleted tweet. Twitter users thought it is part of the company’s plans to bring edit functionality to the platform.
Twitter seems to be testing a neat way to edit tweets. If you delete a tweet when you reply to someone and then go to reply again it brings the old text back so you can correct your typo https://t.co/t4KKLNmjWT pic.twitter.com/YNQ6FSIlLS
— Tom Warren (@tomwarren) September 13, 2020
However, that didn’t last long. In an official tweet, the company shattered the hopes of Twitter users and called it a bug. The so-called bug seems to be prevalent on Twitter’s iOS app.
sorry, this is a bug not anything we’re testing
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) September 14, 2020
This is one of those rare situations where users are hoping for a bug to become a feature. The implementation looks harmless too. The main reason why the company is not adding an Edit button is to preserve its essence and credibility. Since the aforesaid method doesn’t actually let users edit a tweet but rather makes it convenient to fix an old tweet with a replacement, I don’t think it breaks the company’s current stance. However, Twitter doesn’t think so and will probably fix the bug soon.
